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Eddie1's avatar
Eddie1
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Feb 19, 2020

What happens when the active member of a LTM VE pair reaches its demo license expiration?

I have a pair of LTM VE instances with 45-day demo licenses. One of them (let's call it QA-LTM1) will expire in about 30 days, and has been the "active" member, passing Web API traffic for a couple applications we allow beta users to play with. The other node, (QA-LTM2) allegedly expires at the end of today, but hasn't "deactivated" itself yet. We weren't worried about this because QA-LTM1 is typically the active node. For some unknown reason, we had a failover event and QA-LTM2 is now active. We don't want to interrupt traffic again with a failover during peak hours, and would like to wait till our normal 2AM maintenance window to do the failover back to QA-LTM1 and reactivating QA-LTM2 with a new demo license (our salesperson gave us a bunch to play with)

Two questions about this situation:

1) When exactly does the LTM VE deactivate itself when it has reached the end of its license period? Is it relative to local time or UTC? (we're in PST)

2) When it does finally deactivate itself, will it be smart enough to realize it's in an HA pair and "release" its traffic group at that moment over to the other node in the cluster, which is licensed and ready to become active? Or does it remain "active" but just stop passing traffic?

I want to be ready for the moment it intends to deactivate, so that I can force a failover immediately (or at least be on the ready)

 

(As a side, yes, we have connection mirroring enabled, but the VM environment they're running in doesn't permit forged transmits or changing MAC addresses, so we couldn't set a shared floating MAC address for the traffic group. Because of this, a failover requires someone to get into the firewall and manually flush ARP cache to permit the traffic flows to come back up on the newly-active LTM VE node)

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  • Mayur_Sutare's avatar
    Mayur_Sutare
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Feb 19, 2020

    Hi,

     

    When an evaluation/demo license ends, the module becomes inactive and all configuration items are expected to cease functioning. In short, it stops processing traffic.

     

    It will get deactivated itself when it has reached the end. Also it also happens, when the license is expired the BIG-IP Configuration utility gets stuck in “Configuration Utility restarting…” and you cannot login. In such cases, you need to ssh F5 to activate/renew license.

     

    Hope it helps!

     

    Mayur

    • Eddie1's avatar
      Eddie1
      Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
      Feb 19, 2020

      Mayur, I'm familiar with all of that. Those don't answer my specific questions.

      It appears my expiring LTM VE instance finally deactivated itself at midnight local time, which was strange, as it might have allowed me to squeeze more time out of it if I'd just set the system's timezone to UTC-1100. It also failed over properly. This is something I couldn't find in any documentation: HA/failover behavior in an HA pair during a license expiration event.